Verbal Style Research Articles

Aeschylus and the unity of opposites

AbstractThe idea of the ‘unity of opposites’ allows one to see important connections between phenomena normally treated separately: verbal style, ritual, tragic action and cosmology. The stylistic figure of Satzparallelismus in lamentation and mystic ritual expresses the unity of opposites (particularly of life and death) as oxymora. Both rituals were factors in the genesis of tragedy, and continued to influence the style and action of mature tragedy. The author advances new readings of various passages of the Oresteia, which is seen to advocate the replacement of a Herakleitean model of the unity of opposites with a Pythagorean model of their reconciliation.

Language And Adolescent Peer Groups

This article focuses on the use of linguistic resources from the perspective of the creation and maintenance of adolescent groups and categories, and specifically on the use of aspects of verbal style in the creation and maintenance of distinctiveness. It explores the use of a variety of types of linguistic resources, phonological and grammatical variation, lexical innovation, language crossing, and interactive style. It shows how oppositions with which the group defines itself generally also serve as organizing principles within the group, accounting not only for intergroup but for intragroup differences in language use.

The Influence of Learning Style and Cognitive Ability on Recall of Names and Faces in an Older Population

The present study examined whether, for older adults, a verbal or imagery cognitive style is associated with recall of names and faces learned in an experimental condition. Cognitive abilities that are represented in current models of face recognition and name recall were also examined. Those abilities included picture naming, verbal fluency (i.e., naming items within a given category), vocabulary comprehension, visual memory, and the learning of unassociated word pairs. Fifty older adults attempted to learn first and last names of 20 student actors and actresses pictured on videotapes (40 names total). On average, participants learned the most first names, followed by last names, and the fewest full names. The greater the number of responses on a questionnaire associated with an imagery cognitive style, the more the names of faces were correctly identified by participants. There was no significant relationship between a verbal cognitive style and the number of names and faces recalled. As for cognitive abilities, all of the abilities measured—with the exception of vocabulary comprehension—were significantly associated with the number of names and faces learned. A regression analysis indicated that the best predictor of successful name-face learning was the participants' ability to learn and recall 5 unrelated word pairs. When that cognitive measure was deleted from the regression analysis, delayed visual memory and verbal fluency were the next best predictors of the older adults' ability to learn names and faces.

Examining verbal style in presidential campaign spots

Presidential candidates rely on political television spots to communicate their messages to voters, and the language used in spots conveys the verbal style of the candidate. This analysis of 1267 presidential spot units from 1952 through 1996 uses computerized content analysis to identify the presence of verbal style previously identified by Roderick Hart: optimism, realism, activity, and certainty. Findings show different patterns for different presidential candidates, but overall trends suggest that optimism, realism, and certainty has been decreasing. Differences in verbal style for political parties, incumbents and challengers, and winners and losers are also explored.

Woodrow W. Borah (1912-1999)

Woodrow W. Borah (1912-1999)

'Walking the walk and talking the talk': Bodies, conversation, gender and power in higher education in England

Combinations of speaking, listening and bodily behaviour have been neglected in accounts of the operation of power. Although often described as fluid and interactionally produced, power has been the subject of few empirically based analyses at micro-interactional scales. Drawing on interviews with undergraduates and extracts from teaching interactions at higher education institutions in England, this article focuses on talk as a situated practice. It describes how verbal and bodily behaviours together are fundamentally involved in the enactment of instructor and student roles and power relations, and the collective interactional (re)production of teaching spaces. It discusses two broad types of teaching interaction in terms of gendered differences in the structure of talk, drawing attention to how these are shaped by differences in how instructors enact power. I suggest that men may routinely engage in conversations with 'feminine' structures in teaching spaces without this compromising heterosexual masculinity, and present reasons why it may be more likely that women be problematized for using 'masculine' verbal styles. I also argue that rather than simply being inscribed on to instructors' bodies in ways that accord with the hegemonic discourses of gender, authority and respect have to continually be earned from students, and verbal behaviour is deeply involved in this process. It is not enough to 'walk the walk', instructors must also 'talk the talk', in ways that students deem legitimate.

Verbal aggressiveness and communicator style characteristics of summoned jurors as predictors of actual jury selection

Recent research suggests that communication traits play a significant role in the jury selection process. To extend this line of research, 774 jurors in actual cases completed measures of verbal aggressiveness, communicator style, and positive‐disclosiveness. Excused jurors reported higher levels of verbal aggressiveness, dominance, and contentiousness than empaneled jurors. Read in the light of previous research, these findings support the explanation that favorable impression leads to selection on a jury, negative impression leads to rejection from a jury. This explanation appears to be more useful than the alternative explanation that similarity between trial lawyers and jurors leads to selection. While attitudes, beliefs, and demographic characteristics can influence trial outcomes, jurors’ communication predispositions and styles of communicating can dramatically influence the guilt determination process. Two examples are provided.

The Critical Contact: A Study of Recruiter Verbal Behavior During Campus Interviews

The verbal behaviors of 25 corporate recruiters were content analyzed and compared to student applicants'postinterview evaluations of them. Qualitative and quantitative analyses identified and counted helper and other responses made by recruiters. Additional analyses indicated significant variability in the quality of interviews, the talkativeness of recruiters, and the relative impact of recruiter verbal behaviors on the applicants' ratings. Recruiters who para phrased, asked questions, and made influencing statements tended to be rated significantly higher on their expertness, or competence. Recruiters who dis closed sometimes-irrelevant information tended to be rated significantly lower on Responsiveness. These results are discussed within the framework of both critical contacts and social influence theories. Suggestions are made for further research and for what constitutes ''good'' recruiting verbal style.

Translating Camp Talk

This paper examines the association of a specific verbal style, known in English as camp, with male homosexual characters in French and Anglo-American post-war fiction. The implications of such an association are considered in relation to the translation of this fiction. It is argued that camp presents a complex problem for translators in that while it draws on similar formal devices in both English- and French-language texts, it fulfils different functions in the literary and cultural contexts of post-war France, Britain and the United States. An attempt is made to link up the texts and their translations with these distinct contexts. Reference is made notably to the emergence of gay fiction as a literary genre in the English-speaking world and to the alleged resistance in France to the proliferation of subcultural identities.

A surgery oral examination

Poor interrater reliability is a common objection to the use of oral examinations. In 1990 the authors measured the agreement of 140 U.S. and Canadian surgical raters and the influences, if any, of age, years in practice, and experience as an examiner on individual oral examination scores. Eight actor examinees memorized transcripts of actual oral examinations and were videotaped using a single examiner. Examinee verbal style, dress, content of answers, and gender were purposefully adjusted. A repeated-measures analysis of variance was used for data analysis. Three aspects of examinee performance influenced scores (verbal style, dress, and content of answers). No rater characteristic significantly affected scores. Raters showed high agreement (86%) when rating "good" performances but less agreement (67%) when rating "poor" performances. The oral examination scores were not influenced by rater selection. The raters ranked good performances more consistently than poor performances. Therefore, more than one examiner appears necessary to confirm a poor performance during an examination.

But Is It Jazz?

But Is It Jazz? John R. Gennari (bio) John Edward Hasse. Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. 479 pp. Illustrations, filmography, discography, notes, and index. $25.00. Ronald M. Radano. New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1993. 315 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, indexes. $16.95. One of the most alluring and enduring American images of our time — what John Szwed has deemed “the first truly nonmechanical metaphor for the 20th century” 1 — is the black jazz musician. Successor to the English Gentleman as a globally emulated model of sartorial and verbal style, the jazz musician has evolved a constellation of personae ranging from, say, Louis Armstrong the Rabelaisian jester to Wynton Marsalis the demure professional. Buttressed by a plentiful — if, until recently, 2 underrecognized — critical, journalistic, and mythopoetic literature, jazz performers have been savvy coconspirators in the crafting of their public images, deftly appropriating the latest social and technological fashions to fit the cardinal African-American musical value of artist-audience symbiosis. Two new jazz books grapple with the elusive subject of jazz musicians and the discourse that frames their images. John Edward Hasse’s Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington deals with a certified American classic, the composer, bandleader, and celebrity whose work represents, in the words of a sympathetic observer, “by far the most comprehensive orchestration of the actual sound and beat of life in the United States ever accomplished.” 3 Ronald M. Radano’s New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique takes as its subject, by contrast, an almost singularly esoteric artist, an avant-garde experimentalist dubbed by one critic as “the Buckminster Fuller of Jazz.” Hasse, hewing to a vein of jazz commentary that reaches back to the 1930s, achieves something of an apotheosis of traditional jazz historiography. Radano, challenging and deconstructing this entrenched paradigm, dares to propose a new conceptual framework for jazz scholarship. Hasse’s Ellington will be unfamiliar only to those whose perspective on [End Page 91] this famous figure derives from an uncritical reading of James Lincoln Collier’s controversial 1987 biography. 4 Coming in the wake of the firestorm unleashed against Collier for his portrait of the Duke as a relentless manipulator and artistic underachiever, Hasse’s book appears as a modest, unpresuming reminder of the consensus line on Ellington as great artist, as cultural hero, as American genius. It is a useful corrective. Only the most contentious among us can deny the Duke his nonpareil status as a brilliant visionary and craftsman in matters of blues tonality, ensemble textures, and the underlining of a soloist’s distinctive personality. (Ellington: “You can’t write music right unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker,” p. 84.) Only the most jaded can fail to be fascinated by Ellington’s colorful lifestyle or awed by his dogged determination to maintain the solvency and relevance of his band over a half-century of rapidly changing musical fashion. That Ellington was “beyond category” is indisputable. Following his own dictum of keeping one foot in the academy and one in the street, Ellington evolved a musical language that imposed formal order on the rhythms, timbres, and attitudes of African-American everyday life. He struck a fine balance between organizational discipline and individual expressive freedom; and merged the traditionally distinct roles of composer and bandleader by embedding the writing process in a Deweyian social process of performative experimentation. The shifting contours of Ellington’s life and career — the industrious, religious mentoring of his parents embellished by what he called his “poolhall education”; the solid middle-class black Washington of his youth supplanted by the sensuous elegance of the Cotton Club during high tide of the Harlem Renaissance; the hurly-burly pace and fluid social exchange of dance halls and night clubs on the way to august European concert halls and mixing with the Brahmins — render foolish and shortsighted any effort to pigeonhole Ellington (or jazz itself) into neat sociological or artistic categories. One need not endorse Wynton Marsalis’s fundamentalist excesses — his literalist reading of it-don’t-mean-a-thing-if-it-ain...

Inventing and Controlling the Vernacular

African-American studies shares as an emerging discipline certain analogies with the founding of American Studies: both seem to be founded on ideas of the roots of American culture. In one of what I take to be its key 'documents,' Leo Marx identified the ideologically with the peripheral and provincial culture of the South-West. Here the voice of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn resounded in a prehistoric landscape.l .The romantic American hero's life on the margins in a running skirmish with domestic realism readily linked up with race (and gender). About the same time Marx's essay was published Leslie Fiedler was shortly to point out that the moment in American fiction is the moment of the confrontation with the Negro. America's archetypal romance, he told his readers in the 1950s, was a narrative about a white man on the run encountering and adopting the ways of a black man. Here was transgression and subversion, although as an internalized moment in the white man's psyche rather than as the experience of the real historical conditions of Negro life. Marx's vernacular tradition also took its principal illustrations from narratives representing the encounter between black and white characters. In the new critical manner it was perceived as an encounter between two verbal styles. Marx's didn't respect the genteel snobbery and idealism of the dominant American nineteenth century aesthetic and political discourses. His use of Whitman suggests that the

A comparison of verbal interactional styles among families of schizophrenic and bipolar patients

A comparison of verbal interactional styles among families of schizophrenic and bipolar patients

Difficulties in Adolescents' Personal Verbal Style Development

Difficulties in Adolescents' Personal Verbal Style Development

Does processing style affect recall of the rey-osterrieth or taylor complex figures?

This study investigated the effects of visual vs. verbal processing style preferences on immediate recall accuracy for the Rey-Osterrieth and Taylor Complex Figure Tests. Undergraduates were classified as visualizers or verbalizers and asked to copy either the Rey-Osterrieth or Taylor figure and then draw it from memory. A subset of subjects reported the strategy they used to reproduce the figure. Visualizers showed better reproduction accuracy than verbalizers for the Rey-Osterrieth test, and for this test approximately 80% of verbalizers as well as visualizers reported using a visual strategy. For the Taylor, no effect of processing style was obtained, and close to half of the verbalizers (43%) reported using their preferred verbal strategy, while 82% of the visualizers used a visual strategy. These results suggest that a general preference for thinking "in images" is important for predicting visual memory accuracy only on tests such as the Rey-Osterrieth which do not lend themselves easily to a verbal strategy. In contrast, for the Taylor test, deficits to the visual imagery system may be circumvented and obscured by the verbalizers' use of verbal recall strategies. Thus, in test batteries, the Rey-Osterrieth and the Taylor Tests should not be used interchangeably.

Radio psychology talk show hosts: Assessment of counseling style

Radio psychology talk show hosts' responses were analyzed using the 14-category Hill Counselor Verbal Response Category System (HCVRCS) and then compared with the verbal behaviors of other professional and non- professional helpers, including Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, Albert Ellis, family practice lawyers, and mutual-help group leaders. Radio hosts tended to be active and directive in their verbal behaviors, offering primarily advice and information, and only infrequently reflecting, restating, or self-disclosing. In terms of overall verbal style, hosts strongly resembled Ellis and Perls, who were both highly active and directive in their interactions. Hosts were very dissimilar compared to Rogers, whose client-centered approach is principally nondirective. Although both hosts and lawyers were very active, lawyers emphasized facts and knowledge, whereas hosts focused more on feelings and insight. Compared to hosts, mutual-help group leaders gave more information and were more self-disclosing.

Verbal Behaviors of Preschool Stutterers and Conversational Partners

Standard counseling practices with the families of young stutterers include recommendations that listeners' negative verbal behaviors be modified in order to reduce the likelihood of stuttering. This study tested the hypothesis that stuttering and normal disfluencies in preschool stutterers are related to selected verbal behaviors in conversational partners. Twelve 2- to 6-year-old stutterers were video recorded while playing with their mother, father, and a familiar peer. The resulting videotapes were transcribed and two types of social communicative analyses (total number of words and utterances, verbal intent of the speaker) were undertaken. Results suggested that fathers used more words and utterances than mothers and peers. Parents provided more positive interactions with their stutterer offspring than did peers. Parents also asked significantly more negative and routine questions when talking to their stuttering child. Peer playmates were significantly more negative and generally commented more frequently when interacting with stutterers than did the parents. Stutterers were involved in significantly more positive interactions with their fathers. The frequency of fluency failures did not differ significantly when stutterers communicated with their mother, father, or peer partners. Implications regarding verbal styles of partners in relationship to the stuttering of preschool children are discussed.

Psychometric Quality of the Verbalizer-Visualizer Questionnaire as a Measure of Cognitive Style

This study investigated the psychometric quality of the Verbalizer-Visualizer Questionnaire. Analysis indicated the scale was composed of two distinct subscales (visual style and verbal style), not one bipolar scale. While the verbal style subscale predicted verbal ability, the validity of the visual style subscale was not demonstrated. Both subscales should be revised and further study conducted with the visual style subscale.

Therapist specific communication styles and patient resistance: An analogue study

Abstract Two contrasting pairs of verbal therapist communication styles were covaried with three areas of communication loci and were studied in relation to subjects' choices of resistant or resonant ‘patient responses’. Thirty medical students, serving as vicarious patients, observed a videotape of a simulated psychotherapy session and made response choices in relation to 12 therapists' well-specified communications. Contrary to expectations, subjects chose fewer resistant responses following engaged styles of communication than with disengaged styles. Collaborative style of communication, as hypothesized, was followed by less resistant responses than was unidirectional style. Communications that were cast in terms of transferential relationships were generally followed by significantly lower resistant choices than were those relating to past and current relationship loci. No gender differences were observed. Rationale, findings and possible inferences were in relation to dyadic interpersonal influences....

Leadership, Presidential Elections, and Pessimistic Rumination

The psychological study of leadership is undergoing a renaissance, as researchers broaden their work from traditional laboratory studies to important real-life situations. The American presidency is a case in point (Simonton, 1981, 1986, 1988; Winter, 1987, in press). Presidents are selected by competitive elections that are, in Weber's (1921/1947) terms, appeals to charisma. Once in office, presidents wield enormous power-to shape policy, institutions, and the textures of daily life; and by their control of military forces and nuclear weapons, even to affect the future of human life on this planet. Of course there are limits: Elections involve real conditions and issues, and a president's freedom to act is constrained by domestic politics and international counterplayers. To avoid overpsychologizing, we must remember Greenstein's (1969, Chap. 2) specification of situations in which the leader's personality can affect political outcomes: when the situation is new, unstructured, or without elaborate role expectations; when other forces are nearly balanced; or when the behavior, although required by the situation, can still vary in style or level of effort. In terms of method, moreover, we must develop ways of measuring psychological characteristics and leadership outcomes at a distance, because most important political actors cannot be studied directly. On both counts, Zullow and Seligman's article deserves praise. First, they focus on a behavior-running for president-that shows individual variation. And in an age when the mass media are replacing political parties as arbiters of presidential politics, many studies suggest that candidate's personality (or at least the images of that personality conveyed by the media) has an increasingly important effect on election outcomes. Second, Zullow and Seligman use personality variables-rumination and explanatory style-that can be objectively measured and that have, at least in the case of explanatory style, extensive validity credentials based on laboratory research. Finally, they specify three hypothetical mechanisms, which are both consistent with previous research and also plausible in the real world of presidential campaigns, as possible mediators of the observed relationship between candidates' verbal style and their performance.